Harper's revisionism - updated

PMSHithead is off to Europe to add more selfies to his MASSIVE gallery of photo ops that feature mostly his-self.

This might be awkward, given Harper's first stop, and his government's crusade against unions but ... no.

InCONvenient perhaps, but nothing that a judicious pruning of facts - something that his Politburo/PMO excels at doing - can't fix.

The irony in all this of course is that a large chunk of the CPC base is composed of folks who escaped totalitarian regimes, came to Canada, thrived here and were CONned by the party's Reformist/Evangelical populist rhetoric.

There's a reason certain countries outlaw specific religious organisations, unless they're complicit with those in power.  Authoritarian political parties do not want to be undermined.  Added: Nor do they want religious ideologies competing with their own.

As our Parliament surely devolves into the very type of corrupt Stalinist government that Kenney and Harper denounce but only when it suits their purpose, one sane response is to continue to prick holes in their puffery.

Grand merci to Alison at Creekside for the above.

UPDATE: Now with added totalitarian goodness! 

The [Harper] government is expanding its surveillance of public activities to include all known demonstrations across the country, a move that collects information even on the most mundane of protests by Canadians.

The email requesting such information was sent out Tuesday by the Government Operations Centre in Ottawa to all federal departments.

“The Government Operations Centre is seeking your assistance in compiling a comprehensive listing of all known demonstrations which will occur either in your geographical area or that may touch on your mandate,” noted the email, leaked to the Citizen. “We will compile this information and make this information available to our partners unless of course, this information is not to be shared and not available on open sources. In the case of the latter, this information will only be used by the GOC for our Situational Awareness.”

The Government Operations Centre or GOC is supposed to provide strategic-level coordination on behalf of the federal government “in response to an emerging or occurring event affecting the national interest.”

It assesses the requirement for developing plans to prevent or deal with emergencies such as pandemics, earthquakes, forest fires and floods. It also monitors overseas situations such as the 2011 crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan.

But the Government Operations Centre has also been involved, as an intelligence clearing house, in compiling information on Aboriginal protesters.

From here.

Creekside: Skynet - It's all about the children apparently

Go read Alison at Creekside: Skynet - It's all about the children apparently if only because it's entertaining to hear the adulterer Vic Toews lecture to us about the "rights of law-abiding" citizens being subsumed to our Crusading CONtempt Party government's right to trample on our privacy.

ADDED by fh: On Twitter, Canadian Cynic linked to this oldie but goodie, when Dan Savage called for a new definition of 'Toews'. We never did settle on one, did we?

Sauce for the gander, smear for the goose.

Imagine the following scenario.

An ex-patient of an orthopedic specialist initiates a civil suit against her, her gynecological oncologist husband and a hospital. Several years ago the patient found herself in the untenable situation of receiving, while under the care of her specialist, raunchy nude photos of her physician's husband and numerous invitations to have sex with him. The patient deflected these overtures. After her medical treatment was complete, she complained to the hospital who settled with her, giving her shush money provided that she destroyed all compromising photos and documents in her possession.

Now the former patient has gone public and the oncologist, currently the director of a teaching unit at a prestigious hospital, has taken administrative leave pending investigation and resolution of the litigation/complaint. His spouse, who suffered from PTSD at the time, acknowledged she'd posted private intimate photographs and offered his sexual services to this woman, without his consent or knowledge.

If this were a movie script, would it feature stars like Angelina Jolie and George Clooney?

Life imitates the stuff on the silver screen, as the recent actions of a man hoping to score a few million dollars by exploiting a husband's frailty and destroying a woman's life, illustrate.

Here's the actual story, not glossed by some Hollywood re-write.

[...] sexually explicit photographs of Douglas are part of the complaint made in July by Alexander Chapman, a 44-year-old computer specialist, who says he was harassed by the judge’s husband to have sex with her.

Chapman said after he retained Winnipeg family lawyer Jack King in 2003 to handle his divorce, King showed him about 30 nude photographs of Douglas and supplied him with a password for a porn website devoted to interracial sex. [...]

If a lawyer deliberately posts nude photos of herself on Facebook or on a website it could later undermine public confidence in her ability to serve as a judge, said Lorne Sossin, dean of law at Osgoode.

However, if the photos were taken in the context of an inherently private relationship and posted without her consent, Sossin said, it’s hard to imagine she should be judged negatively.

Sossin suggested it would also be unfair to find Douglas unfit for judicial office simply on the basis of her sexual predilections. At an earlier time, the same might have been said about homosexuals, he added.

In the first (fictional) instance, the demand for accountability (regarding sexual harassment and violation of sexual privacy) would be specifically directed at the spouse who acted with reckless disregard for her profession's code of conduct and her husband's privacy.

But in real life the public blaming, shaming, and punishing of women continues, whether they're sex workers, complainants in a high-profile contentious sexual interlude, G20 political activists or judges.

Because they're women, it makes them fair game for the gynophobes - within the RCMP, Harper's Conservative party or the CBC.

Note: Yes, I changed the title when I realized I'd written opposite to what I intended.

Woman suing Bell Canada for privacy violation.

This was heard on Radio-Canada; I'm not finding any news about this on Canadian English media yet. I'll add a link when I can find one.

The story: A businesswoman in Sault-Ste-Marie is planning to sue Bell Canada because the electronic information she had stored on a cell phone that she returned to one of their service outlets was not deleted. She says a sales rep told her the crushed phone could not be repaired and was assured it would be destroyed.

She reports that she received an email from a woman in the US who had purchased a phone on eBay. The message told her that her address, as well as volumes of her information were found intact on the cell phone.

The Bell client says that she was relieved that a honest person had purchased the item and contacted her directly. Bell Canada claims that damaged cell phones returned to them are neither recycled nor re-sold.

You can check out any time you want

... but you can never leave. Yes, this post is about f***ing Facebook and its continued flouting of privacy regulations.

User photographs can still be found on many social networking sites even after people have deleted them, Cambridge University researchers have said. They put photos on 16 popular websites - noting the web addresses where the images were stored - and deleted them. The team said it was able to find them on seven sites - including Facebook - using the direct addresses, even after the photos appeared to have gone.

Facebook claims that photos deleted by its subscribers are removed from its servers immediately.

To perform their experiment, the researchers uploaded photos to each of the sites, then deleted them, but kept a note of direct URLs to the photos from the sites' content delivery networks. When they checked 30 days later, these links continued to work for seven of the sites even though a typical user might think the photos had been removed. [O]ne of the PhD students who carried out the study, said: "This demonstrates how social networking sites often take a lazy approach to user privacy, doing what's simpler rather than what is correct."

Last year, when Facebook attempted to change the terms of use, subscribers objected and some even sought legal recourse.